For as long as firearms have been known, bullets and shot have been fabricated from lead. Lead has been the most commonly accepted metal of choice because of its unique collection of properties making it ideally suited for use with firearms. It is, for example relatively low in cost, soft, melts at a low temperature, is dense and causes little damage to gun barrels, all while providing consistent accuracy. One may well wonder why anyone would seek to replace lead with other materials. The answer is that lead has been discovered to be poisonous and of environmental concern. For example lead contamination of marshes offers significant potential for waterfowl lead poisoning when birds ingest lead from spent shells. As a result, lead has been banned for shooting migratory waterfowl in the United States. Lead also can cause lead contamination in many other environments, creating potential hazards both for the ecosystem and for the food chain. As a result of these known disadvantages with lead, many inventors have experimented with environmentally friendly or so-called “green bullets” that contain little or no lead. One of the many motivations for this effort is that lead contamination resulted in closure of hundreds of indoor and outdoor target ranges. For example it has been reported that 1,100 indoor ranges have been closed because they lacked adequate ventilation to disperse airborne lead emitted when lead core bullets are fired. Such range closings have affected both national guard and reserve units by cutting down on training time and forcing them to travel long distances to other more suitable ranges.
It has also been reported that the United States armed forces use between 300 million and 400 million rounds of small caliber ammunition each year. Of course most of this ammunition is used in target practice. This dramatically increases the amount of hazardous lead deposits in shooting ranges. For example it has been reported in the national press that the Pentagon estimated the cost of lead cleanup of contaminated sites at closed military bases as high as nine billion dollars!
It can be seen therefore that there is a substantial need for the development of new compositions of matter that are satisfactory for bullets and shot which are environmentally friendly and yet provide suitable accuracy, equivalent to lead base composites.
At first blush it may seem inconsistent to develop green bullets when the object of bullets is of course precision striking and lethal shooting. However the fact is that most bullets are used for training and target shooting, so the purpose of green or environmentally friendly bullets is not at all inconsistent. There are also significant uses for bullets other than lethal shooting, for example dosing large animals with medicaments etc. For the latter uses, bullets must contain little or no toxic materials, have accuracy for short and sometimes long distances, and be relatively inert to their payload (medicament) which they carry and to the animal that is being injected with the payload.
Accordingly it is a primary object of the present invention to provide a particulate composition which is environmentally friendly, which allows the making of bullets with accuracies which are generally equal to the accuracy of lead bullets, and which may be tailor made amongst a range of particulate composition formulations specifically for the ultimate end use of the projectile such as target shooting, law enforcement uses, military uses, animal medicating, etc.
Another object is to fulfill the substantial need as above discussed.
A still further objective is to provide a composition for bullets and shot which perform well in conventional firearms.
Another object of the invention relates to a method of preparing the particulate composition by adopting use of suitable and conventional methodology such as spray drying, pelleting, injection molding, compression molding, etc.
The method and means for accomplishing each of the above objectives as well as others will become apparent from the detailed description which follows.
It goes without saying, and it will be apparent to those of ordinary skill in the art, that modifications within the range of the formulations here presented may be achieved and still fall within the spirit and scope of the invention. Applicant therefore prepares the balance of this application with the understanding and reliance on the U.S. Patent Laws including the Doctrine of Equivalence in order to provide adequate protection for the invention herein disclosed.